Leslie Slavin

Leslie Slavin is a seventeen-year-old whose abduction on a crowded Saturday night in Westwood becomes a decisive reversal in the novel’s account of the Trawler murders. Identified by the Trawler as his final victim in Los Angeles County, her disappearance makes it clear that Robert Mallory was not the killer, discredits Bret Ellis’s insistence that he was, and leaves Bret isolated at Buckley.

Identity and Disappearance

Leslie’s story is presented through the circumstances of her disappearance rather than through a developed personal history. On November 21, she left a group of friends at Yesterdays in Westwood and walked to her car, parked in a garage on Glendon Avenue. She vanished on a crowded Saturday night, a setting in which the ordinary movement from a gathering to a parked car offers no protection from the Trawler’s reach.

The novel identifies Leslie as seventeen and says that she was the Trawler’s final victim in Los Angeles County. The account gives no further details of her life, her relationship to the other characters, or what happened to her after the abduction. Her significance is instead carried by the timing and consequences of her disappearance: it occurs after Bret has come to believe that Robert was responsible for the murders and after Bret’s story about Robert has been accepted as a persuasive explanation.

The Trawler’s Claim and Robert’s Exoneration

After Leslie disappears, a series of home invasions begins again, though the account distinguishes them from the attack at the Reynolds residence on North Canon Drive. The Trawler denies responsibility for that Beverly Hills incident while tacitly acknowledging other invasions. A letter sent to the Los Angeles Times and verified by the Los Angeles Police Department supplies information that Bret’s version had obscured: the Trawler refers to Robert not by name but as the God, and describes the crimes as gifts and sacrifices left for him.

The letter also identifies Audrey Barbour as a sacrifice and says that the Trawler and his supposed friends had soundproofed the basement of an abandoned Benedict Canyon house that Robert sometimes visited. Audrey had been held there for days before her death and discovery. In light of that account, Leslie’s abduction is not evidence of Robert’s guilt but part of the Trawler’s own continuing campaign and his effort to claim responsibility for the victims and projects associated with Robert.

The letters had stalked Robert for almost a year and a half, but had not named victims or connected themselves plainly to the home invasions. Robert had not understood their relationship to the crimes. The Trawler’s communication therefore reframes the apparent connection: Robert was the object of an obsessive, threatening fixation, not the author of the murders Bret attributed to him.

Consequences for Bret and the Narrative

Before Leslie’s abduction, Bret’s forceful account of the November 7 encounter with Robert had become the core version of events. Abigail Mallory publicly disputed Bret’s account, but she had not witnessed the encounter; Bret’s dramatic narrative nonetheless shaped what others believed. The letter and Leslie’s disappearance make that account untenable. The narrator recognizes that Robert had not killed anyone and had instead been caught in the Trawler’s mind games and obsession.

Bret’s standing at Buckley then erodes through small, accumulating acts of social exclusion. Students and teachers avoid acknowledging him; he stands alone during assembly, eats apart from the former center of his group, and is left out of lunches and social plans. Debbie Schaffer does not invite him to Jeff Taylor’s birthday party, and he is excluded from a planned movie outing in Westwood. Leslie’s case thus changes more than the murder narrative: it reverses Bret’s temporary status as the student believed to have stopped the Trawler and turns him into an outsider for having accused Robert.

Narrative Significance

Leslie remains largely unseen in the narrative, but her disappearance supplies the decisive evidence that separates the Trawler’s crimes from Bret’s interpretation of Robert. Her case exposes the limits of a compelling personal account: Bret’s confidence and dramatic version had produced a provisional public truth, but new evidence reverses it. The Trawler’s letter makes Leslie part of a pattern of sacrifices intended for Robert, while the consequences at Buckley show how quickly a community can withdraw belief and belonging when its accepted story changes.